Baker | The Dinner Special podcast

124: Robyn Holland: Baking Up a Whole New Way to Treat Yourself

May 25, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sweetish.co

Robyn launched her blog in 2015 after a decade of dabbling in storytelling through writing, baking, and photography. She is obsessed with people and food, and her food experiences range from working in professional bakeries to teaching cooking classes to freelance baking and cooking for clients. Robyn firmly believes there is joy in treating yourself when you treat yourself well.

I am so excited to have Robyn Holland of Sweetish.co on the show today.

(*All photos below are Robyn’s.)

On A Whole New Way to Treat Yourself:

We played around with that tagline and that purpose a lot, and we would like to incorporate a lot more how-to on things for people to learn, so a lot of educational stuff, instead of just a recipe.

I think one of the big things that I wanted to do is bust through some of these food rumors, like what is really good for you versus what isn’t good for you at all. I know it seems oxymoronic,…I don’t know the right word…but ironically, even, because I do talk so much about desserts. But I’m very specific with the ingredients that I’ll use, and I would like to introduce produce and different flours, gluten-free options, just fun stuff like that into our everyday baking. So I really wanted to come at it from that angle and that approach. Sweetish to me, I wanted to create this online bakery, and bakeries don’t just have sweets, they have savory, too, incorporating that concept.

On Learning How to Bake:

The first dish I probably learned to bake were chocolate chip cookies. And my mom, she’s a really good cook, and my Grandma was a really good cook, and I just learned. I remember making pizza dough with my dad in the kitchen, just for fun, when I was little, six years old. And so we just were very much a family of food and always making things. And baking from scratch has just been a big part of my upbringing.

And then when I moved away for university, for college, I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to do this on my own.” That’s probably when I really fell in love with it even more because it was just me in the kitchen. I realized I could create all of these different things and started taking food science classes. I actually started working in a bakery. So it just escalated from there, really just wanting to learn.

On What it’s Like Baking Wedding Cakes:

Very terrifying, yes, very. I am not a culinary institute graduate. I learned from some amazing bakers at the bakeries I’ve worked at. But I felt very like, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t know how to do this.” So luckily the style of the cakes that they wanted were very much me, very, very simple and flowers here and there and different things like that, and they just wanted them to taste good and be pretty. So I’ve done freelance work like that. It’s super nerve-racking. The transportation of wedding cakes is the worst. It’s like, “Okay. Oh, my gosh. I forgot about this, and I forgot about having to drop them off somewhere.”

But that concept of just very simple, very, very simple and very homemade. Pretty, but very homemade, and that’s really the feeling I wanted to bring into Sweetish, very approachable, very homemade. There are some incredibly beautiful cakes and different things out there, and I’m just like, “Gosh, I’m so simple compared to that.” I really don’t want to hassle a lot with food or with baking. I want it to be easy, I want it to be really good, and I want to know what’s in my baked goods.

That approach was definitely taken into the wedding cakes. They didn’t have to do a bunch of sugar art or anything like that and just did really simple, beautiful.

On a Dish That is Special to Her:

There are so many. I don’t know if I will even ever post about this, but one dish that we used to make growing up… We have a lot of Danish heritage, and we called it cream eggs on toast. We would butter toast, we’d get really good bread, and we’d just toast it, and every kid would have a fun job in the kitchen for preparing this meal. And it probably sounds really gross, but it was really good. We’d tear toast up, and then my mom would make this cream sauce, like a Béchamel sauce. And then we would have hard boiled eggs, and you would mix the white part of the hard boiled eggs with the cream sauce. And then you’d pour it over these little pieces of buttered toast, and then you’d crumble the egg yolk on top. That was some sort of Danish thing that my Grandma would make. I don’t even know.

It was a super cheap dinner, but we loved dipping our little pieces of toast in this cream sauce with egg. Even now, it probably wouldn’t even be half as good, but it was just such a special memory that we were involved and making this special dish growing up. There are so many more that probably sound so much more appealing than that.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I love Gordon Ramsay, his show. I’ve kind of been watching old shows, though. I love Cooked…That’s a documentary series…and Chef’s Table on Netflix, both of those. And then anything that has to do with Barefoot Contessa I watch all the time. Those are probably my top ones.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

There are so many. There are a few that I have been obsessed with lately. I love Sprouted Kitchen. She’s probably my favorite blogger out there, and I’ve read her blog probably the longest. I love With Food And Love, I love Sherrie, what she’s doing…and I love Heartbeet Kitchen. That’s another one. She just has beautiful photography. You can just feel her sunshine through her posts. I love Hummingbird High. I think she does awesome bakery goods stuff, and I love what she’s doing. There are a bazillion.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

I follow probably more people on Instagram than anything else. I love following Apartment Therapy for different things for kitchen ideas because I dream of having an amazing kitchen some day. I love Hey, Sweet Pea. They’re really fun and inspirational, and they’re a husband/wife team that have started their own business. They started the branding program that I had mentioned previously, so they’re super inspiring.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I’ll go with unusual. I bought this super weird pie rack…I wish I could show it to you…but it looks like chicken coop circles. And I guess it was something that they used to cool pies on, and it looks like an empty wired cake pan. You’re supposed to put a pie to cool on top and then a pie to cool on the middle. I saw it at this cool store up in northern California, and I was like, “What is that?” They told me it was a pie cooling rack. So I don’t even know if it really is, but I had my eyes on it.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Raw onions. I used to hate raw onions, and now I like them. If I’m putting them in sauces and stuff or dressings, it can’t be a ton, but I definitely have learned to like them more.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Barefoot Contessa at Home, it’s one of my favorite cookbooks ever. I love Huckleberry. That’s one of my favorite cookbooks. The Violet Bakery Cookbook. I love her stuff. Those are some good ones.

Barefoot Contessa, the original cookbook, is one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. That is the cookbook that got me cooking.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I love listening to the Lumineers. They’re my favorite. And then I love listening to The Black Keys, and sometimes I’ll put on The Beach Boys. That’s fun and upbeat to listen to. Those three are probably my favorite.

On Keeping Posted with Robyn:

Instagram is a great way, and I love comments and stuff on my blog. Email, I check regularly. So any of those platforms are really good. Keep an eye out for YouTube because we hope to have it up and running, and we will definitely post that on the blog. Sweetish.co, the actual blog site, is probably the best way to see what’s up and coming. And Instagram, too. I try to keep that up to day as much as possible.

018: Jonathan Melendez: Guiding Home Cooks via Food Photography

March 27, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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The Candid Appetite

Jonathan is a cook, a baker, blogger and food photographer, and what is really great about his blog is that he is meticulous in photographing the steps in all his recipes and posts. You can basically figure out how to make his dishes by simply looking at his beautifully styled images.

I’m so pumped to have Jonathan Melendez of The Candid Appetite joining me today.

On Photographing Food:

I went to culinary school for a brief period, like right after high school, and all my life I thought I would become a chef. I quickly learned being in school that it just wasn’t everything that I thought it was. It completely took the fun out of cooking away from me. So I stopped going to culinary school, and I threw myself back into school taking all my general education classes.

I took one basic photography class and then that evolved into a passion that I didn’t even know I had. It wasn’t until my senior year of college that somebody told me like, “Hey, you should really photograph food. That makes sense because of your background,” and it was born through that, and I was able to combine two of my passions basically into one thing.

On Starting His Blog:

I needed a final project for my graduating class- the final class you need right before you get your degree. And for me I wanted to do something that was fun, and I thought I could incorporate this blog with my school work and get credit for it. The idea behind the step by step came to me because I’ve been following food blogs for many years. And I always come across the same questions of people asking like, “Oh, am I doing this right? Is it supposed to look this way?”

Most often you see a blog that only has one image of the final product and people don’t know the steps in between. So I guess I wanted a resource for people to be able to see it step by step, that there wouldn’t be questions for them. It would guide them through it and hold their hand, I guess, in the kitchen. So that’s how it came around.

The images are so predominant in it because of my photography background. But, you know, when it comes to the bottom line of it, I really want the food to shine. I feel like having those images there gives people the chance to be able to do it, gives them the confidence.

On What Comes Most Naturally:

I would say that cooking comes so naturally to me because it was something that I have always done ever since I was really young. To me cooking is a way to relieve stress basically.

You would think that even after a full day of shooting and making a bunch of recipes, I won’t want to make dinner. But I still do and I think it’s because it gives me that chance to forget about everything that I have to do. Get in the kitchen, and just kind of cook as I go.

Cooking to me is super easy because you could not think about it. You could basically whip up something without having to really measure everything out. Whereas baking is more precise and I have to go through the trouble of accurate measuring, and that sometimes becomes a little tedious. So I would say baking to me is one of the hardest things that I do on a daily basis.

On Who Inspires Him:

In the food blogging world, it would have to be Joy the Baker, Joy Wilson. She for me was one of my biggest inspirations when I first started my blog, and then Ree Drummond from The Pioneer Woman, for sure. I think she kind of set the way for all these food bloggers that came after her.

As far as just regular TV personalities, because I did grow up watching the Food Network a lot, I would say Ina Garten, Emeril, Mario Batali, and Sara Moulton were some of my all-time favorite people to see on TV.

The only person I’ve ever cooked for in that list is Joy, and I think it wasn’t even anything that fancy. I believe I made her soup. It was potato and kale soup or something like that.

On Doughnuts:

You never say no to a doughnut.

I’m from California, Southern California. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and there is a small shack in Burbank, California, that’s like a small mom and pop shop. It’s called The Doughnut Hut and seriously like the best doughnuts I’ve ever had.

I’m not a fancy doughnut connoisseur. I get down with the classics like the bare minimum. My favorite doughnut to get there is a cake doughnut that has just regular vanilla frosting and colored sprinkles. It’s the best thing ever. That place just knows what they are doing.

There’s a line around the block, I mean, it’s big and it’s not a big place at all. It’s like a little hut, you can’t even walk in. You order from a window on the sidewalk and it’s just the best doughnuts you’ve ever had.

On Collaborating with Joy the Baker:

I have these quirky weird things that go on in my life, and I kind of stalked her on her social media platforms.

I came across a photo of her cat and I commented on it, and we kind of became friends through this photo and my comments. I kept telling her how obsessed I was with her cat, so I saw her at a book signing once and I went up to her, and I was, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m the one that’s obsessed with your cat.” And then it kind of developed a friendship through that weirdness basically. That was, I think, two or three years ago, and now we’ve kind of become friends because of that.

I am currently shooting her third book right now that will come out in 2017, I believe.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

Chopped and Top Chef.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

I’m currently obsessed with i am a food blog, which is an amazing food blog. I’m obsessed with it. Stephanie, who writes the blog is amazing. Her photographs just give me such inspiration, it’s amazing.

Souvlaki For The Soul, which is another blog that is very photo oriented. Very pristine photos that I could only wish I would one day be able to take photos like, and Top with Cinnamon, which is a food blog run by a 18 or 17-year-old. I’m thinking like I’m 25, there are people out there so much older who are all doing these food blogs, and here’s an 18, 17-year-old doing everything we can, but so much better than anybody else out there, and I’m obsessed with it.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

I have to admit I’m really bad with Twitter, and I have it, but only because I have a blog, and it’s there. I hardly ever update it.

Pinterest, I wish I pinned more, and I don’t. So I don’t really follow anybody there.

Instagram, of course, is my number one favorite social media, and I follow Chronicle Books. The publishing house does a really good job with their Instagram account, and it’s nice to see them have this passion for books.

I feel like nowadays with all these ebook readers and tablets and iPhones and everything else that’s out there, I feel like actual books are becoming really hard to find, and books are going extinct. I feel like here is a publishing house that’s showing us cookbooks that are actually there, like actual physical cookbooks. I still find them exciting, and every time I see one of their photos on my feed, it just puts a smile on my face because they do such an amazing job.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

I would say a black pepper mill because I hate already ground pepper. I feel like it doesn’t have the same potency and the same flavor as freshly ground, so I am always using that pepper mill.

Those coarse grounds instead of just the finely ground powdered stuff? I feel like it’s instantly better.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

I’m going to say potatoes. I’m obsessed with potatoes. I’m obsessed with a lot of things, but potatoes is definitely one of them.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I have to say the first one is Homemade Decadence. I am biased towards it, but it’s a great book. I love seeing it.

Ceviche, by a man named Martin Morales. I love this book. I don’t know if you’ve seen this book, but it’s a Peruvian ceviche book, and the cover has this texture of white tile, like kitchen tile on it. It’s just really nice. It’s a great book.

There’s Huckleberry cookbook, it’s published through Chronicle Books, and I believe it’s a bakery also, but it makes me so happy because the sides of the book, like of the pages, have a design on it. It’s like a yellow color with white polka dots on it. I had never seen that before.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I go through these phases that I’ll listen to certain songs more often than not, and I guess right now I’m addicted to a song called Burnin’ Up by Jessie J. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that song because it’s very poppy, and it’s very upbeat and fast, and I feel like that’s something that you definitely want to be cooking to.

It depends on my mood, and the time of day it is, like at night after I’ve done a ton and have a full day of work, and a full day of shooting, the last thing I want to do is listen to something super upbeat. So I’ll put on a record and I’ll listen to something that’s kind of mellow. At the beginning of the day when I need to wake up, that’s when I’m listening to something that’s more fast and upbeat.

Keep Posted on Jonathan:

I’m going to say Instagram. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when I don’t post something on Instagram, and I’m always putting my blog updates there as well as life updates. I just feel like it’s great. Since, again, I’m so photo oriented. For me it’s the perfect social media to update.

You can check out the blog at thecandidappetite.com.

Have One of Jonathan's Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now:

012: Maria Siriano: How To Have Fun Baking and Her Top Baking Tip

March 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sift and Whisk

Today we’re chatting about baking and for me the best part of any dinner, dessert.

Maria is a self-taught baker and dessert maker whose love of baking and sweet things shine through on her blog and in her photography.

I am so pumped to have Maria Siriano from Sift and Whisk here on the show.

On Starting Her Blog:

I used to work in textbook publishing and I actually started off as an intern, literally the day after I graduated college. So I was doing that for about a year and a half and they brought me on from intern to being a temp. The company went on a hiring freeze right before I was about to interview for a permanent job so that kind of sucked. I then was able to go freelance doing publishing stuff.

So I was at home doing textbook editing and I was baking all time because it’s stress relief for me.

In Ohio, which is where I live, we have cottage bakery laws so you can have a home-based bakery, sell stuff at farmers’ markets and that’s what I started doing. I did that for a year and half while I was editing.

Because I was selling stuff I had a website that I created for my bakery and I was doing a blog. So I would put some recipes on there of the stuff that I didn’t sell because I really only sold cookies and occasionally cupcakes but I really enjoyed the blog process and the photography process more than actually going to farmers’ markets and selling.

I was making the same thing every single day which didn’t really appeal to me. So I was like I want to experiment and try new stuff and take more pictures. I was really into photography in high school so then I kind of gradually shut down the home-based bakery and picked up full-time with the blogging.

It has been a little over two years now, it was two years in November and I love it. It is the best job anybody could ask for. Now that’s what I do entirely.

I want to share things with people.

I find that I get a lot more joy out of sharing with a broader audience than I do in a really niche market of just my hometown. So it’s a great way for me to connect with people.

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

I still don’t think that it comes naturally to me and whenever somebody compliments me on any of those things I’m like OK what do you want.

But it takes a lot of work and I can see improvement in myself. I’m still trying to improve everything I do because I have my own style of writing. I am an English major. I was really good at writing essays about literature, but I’m not a fiction type person and I always say I’m just such a narcissist and that’s why I can do a blog because I can just write about myself all day.

It’s like journaling. For me it is really cathartic, and I like to have a sense of humor about it and I hope that people appreciate that sense of humor. I hope that I don’t offend anybody ever. I am always worried about that.

Then the photography, I am obsessed with looking at other people’s photography. I always feel like I am almost there, and then somedays I’m just like this is just crap. I still struggle with it, and feeling like it’s good, but if somebody else looks at it and thinks it’s good, I’m over the moon.

But basically my blog is exactly how I talk but with less cursing because I try to keep it clean because maybe a fourteen year old will want a cookie recipe, and then I’ll feel really bad if their parents are like, “Oh, stop cursing.”

On Her Connection to Baking:

In my family growing up, we almost never cooked homemade meals. We did a lot of the frozen. We were like Stouffers‘ people. We did the lasagna. My mom made a couple different meals that she would do like homemade meatloaf, but homemade is in quotations because she would do the Hungry Man or whatever that is in the can.

Both my parents worked, and she was going to college when I was a kid so it was all very take out and boxed food and all that. Whereas my husband grew up in house where they cooked dinner every single night, they rarely went out to eat. So when we moved in together, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he is cooking me dinner every night. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” But it took some getting used to. Because we never cooked in my family.

The one thing that we did was bake. For a while we did a lot of boxed mix stuff like cakes like that. We weren’t really fancy about it or precise about it, but we did a lot of cookies, which is my first from scratch baking experience. We did molasses cookies which is a recipe I did on my blog and is still one of my favorite recipes because it is my family’s recipe.

I always want to learn how to cook so what I started doing a couple months ago up until the Holiday craziness set in, I was saying “I am cooking dinner every Wednesday night because I need to learn to cook.”

For awhile right after I got laid off at my publishing job, my parents were trying to kick me back some money so they were like, “Hey, come cook for us. Make freezer meals and we will pay you.” So I would cook everything for them and freeze it, and they’d give me a hundred bucks a week or something and I was like, “Thanks mom and dad.”

Everything I make always turns out really good if I follow the recipe but I can’t do what my husband does which is open the fridge and be like, “Oh, I will just throw all this stuff together and we have dinner.” I can’t do it.

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

Whenever people are like I want to get into more baking, I am always like buy a scale. That is my number one advice is buy a kitchen scale. It’ll set you back 30 bucks and it’ll change everything.

My husband has had relative success baking with his kind of free-form method. There are certain things I think that you can do if you like dessert and want to make dessert but don’t want to do all the complicated stuff, and it gets a little what I call “semi-homemade with Sandra Lee.”

You can go to the store and you can buy pre-made pound cake. You can dice that and put some strawberries in it and some whipped cream and that’s really easy. You can just pour sugar or whatever and just toss everything together and that’s really easy to do. You don’t have to do a lot of measuring and things like that.

Even pie, if you don’t make your own crust, the filling you can guesstimate and if it’s not thick enough you add a little more corn starch or you bake it a little longer and it’s not so daunting, but there are certain things that I would stay away from.

Cookies can flop miserably if they aren’t very accurate and cakes, so I think that it just depends upon how desperately you want something.

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

I did a black forest pie for my husband and I got the wrong type of liqueur for the filling and I just ran all over town. I actually literally have the bowl of the first filling sitting on my counter top just sitting out right now because I’m like, “Maybe I can put this on French toast tomorrow morning.” I don’t know what to do with it.

There was one time I made, a couple years ago, and this didn’t even make it to the blog because I was so over it, but it was a lemon zucchini bread. It tasted like rubber. I don’t know what happened. It was so disgusting. I made two of them because I am always really hopeful that it’s going to turn out. Instead of paring back a recipe, I just go all in. So I had two of these loaves of rubber, and I just threw them in the trashcan because I will rage eat the bad stuff. I eat it because I am like, “I hate you so much.” I don’t understand it but that’s what I do.

I had that with macaroons. I made those literally ten times before I finally got one that was blog-worthy.

I was like, “I will go to the bakery down the street.” We have a really good French bakery down the street and they make amazing ones. I’m like, “Why do we even bother.”

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

What I usually do is I start off with a seasonal ingredient and I do a lot research on that. If there is nothing seasonal then I go with chocolate, caramel, peanut butter, things like that, but I try to stick to seasonal because I am a big fruit person, and I know people are always like, “Make more chocolate.” And I’m like, “No.”

So I start off with finding something seasonal that I want to work with and then I have the book called The Flavor Bible. I will go through there and there’s a list of complementary ingredients and flavors and I will go through there and kind of get inspired by that.

Then I will just think of all the formats and I try to flesh out the categories equally so like pies, cakes, cookies, whatever, but I will say I tend to skew toward pie. I like pie. I will end up with so many pies and tarts that I am like, “Oh my gosh, I have to tone it down,” but I love making them. And then summer, ice cream, I’ll just do ice cream until my ears bleed.

And honestly, a lot of what I do is built off other people’s work because that is what’s great about making recipes is you can. A lot of the testing is done by other people for you so you can find a base or find something similar. Like the roasted plum, I knew somebody had done a roasted peach ice cream, so I said, “Okay, if she did it like this and used this method for peaches, I can do the same thing with plums,” and kind of build from there.

I always try my best to list my source because I’m not a genius. I can’t just make up scientific baking things in my mind.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

So this is embarrassing but I don’t have cable so I don’t watch a ton, but what I do have is some Alton Brown, Good Eats.

We actually have them downloaded and when we travel, we will put episodes on our iPad and watch those because they’re fantastic and full of science.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Everything.

I have a thousand in my feed. I am a huge fan of Serious Eats because again they do a lot of science so I love listening to all of that, reading all that.

Blogs, I love Bakers Royale, her photography is just ridiculous and I’m jealous. Also Half Baked Harvest, and my friend Sarah who does the Sugar Hit and my friend Elizabeth who does Sugar Hero.

Elizabeth does candy and she’s amazing because I cannot do candy to save my life.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Bonnie Tsang. I think she is the one that has the little daughter, and she is so cute and every time, she just posts really fun and brightly colored things. Every time I see a picture, it just makes my heart happy.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

All home cooks should have chocolate.

I can’t tell you how much you can make with chocolate but if you don’t have it, it kind of stinks.

So the great thing about chocolate is if you have it, you can just eat it. If you don’t want to just eat chocolate, you can make all kinds of stuff with it like pudding, whip that up really fast, or just add it to any other thing and it makes it better.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter. It is very simple for me. I go through so much butter it is not even funny. Every time I do a vegan recipe, I am like, “Where is the butter?”

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Oh my god, everything. I collect cookbooks so I just love everything. My favorite cookbook is the Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook because it is just such a great reference. If you want to riff on something, they’ve got such a great base recipes.

I also really love, this isn’t baking but, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution book. We cook a lot out of there, and since I’m not very good at cooking, it is really easy for me to follow. It’s got a revolutionary way of making rice that is just fantastic and lots of Indian food which I love.

I love all of the Baked cookbooks, Baked Bakery in New York. I get all of them as soon as they come out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

This is really embarrassing, from West Side Story, the song, I want to live in America.

I am a big proponent of singing show tunes while I’m baking, it has such an up beat, it’s just very upbeat so it really gets me going and on track, and the solid beat of it makes me do everything in a timely fashion.

Keep Posted on Maria:

I’m best at updating Facebook. I’m terrible at Twitter, so yeah definitely follow me on Facebook because you will always see the new recipes. Any other things that are a little bit personal, and maybe kind of funny, is on Twitter, but I’m not regular about it.

On A Whole New Way to Treat Yourself:

On Learning How to Bake:

On What it’s Like Baking Wedding Cakes:

On a Dish That is Special to Her:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Robyn:

On Photographing Food:

On Starting His Blog:

On What Comes Most Naturally:

On Who Inspires Him:

On Doughnuts:

On Collaborating with Joy the Baker:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Jonathan:

Have One of Jonathan's Special Dish Recipe Sent to You Now:

On Starting Her Blog:

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

On Her Connection to Baking:

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Maria:

Have Maria’s Special Recipe Sent To You Now: